On Disapointment and Resiliency
For a daily blog, I sure skip a lot of days, don't I? I guess it's been a week since my last entry - sorry about that to anyone who is reading these.
It's been a great run of steady work for me since July, and it's far from over, BUT it's not as if I'm overwhelmed by the income. So, when a prospective project comes in with a budget of $6000, I do my best to get it. This one would have been 100 small watercolor paintings of particular flowers, not the easiest of tasks, but one I would have been well able to do. I happend to be pretty good at doing flowers, although I make fun of the artists who do them obsessively, all recalling Georgia O'Keefe.
To make a not-so-long-story shorter, the job fell through and went to some other, obviouslly inferior, artist. I never had much of a chance to compete for the job, which is for the best, since I really dislike doing any spec work, exercises in futility as they tend to be. And, I was about to do two pieces on spec for this one. Just the same, it came as something of a blow when the bad news came.
In the not-too-distant past, this sort of setback would plunge me into depression, fueled by thoughts like, "If I were good enough, this wouldn't have happened." and other forays into the road of misery and self-deprecation. To my credit, I never once had that thought and Id id get out of the bog of loss and mourning in about 2 hours or so, which may be a world record for me. And, in the future, when I have my next professional disapointment, I'm gong to be over it and have it processed in no more than one hour. I'm aiming for 30 seconds of procesing or even the Zen Buddhist record: one nano second, and it's over and done with. Hey, you gotta have goals.
As a moral to the story, the next day, a nice job came in. This one not only will pay better on the hourly rate, but has much more potential for the long run. So, we'll see if I'm able to parlay it into something better.
I'm still hard at work on the Telluride Blues poster, which is coming out well, and there are a few other good things in the offing. I'm doing too well to let one little disapointment ruin my day, or my life, whichever comes first.
It's been a great run of steady work for me since July, and it's far from over, BUT it's not as if I'm overwhelmed by the income. So, when a prospective project comes in with a budget of $6000, I do my best to get it. This one would have been 100 small watercolor paintings of particular flowers, not the easiest of tasks, but one I would have been well able to do. I happend to be pretty good at doing flowers, although I make fun of the artists who do them obsessively, all recalling Georgia O'Keefe.
To make a not-so-long-story shorter, the job fell through and went to some other, obviouslly inferior, artist. I never had much of a chance to compete for the job, which is for the best, since I really dislike doing any spec work, exercises in futility as they tend to be. And, I was about to do two pieces on spec for this one. Just the same, it came as something of a blow when the bad news came.
In the not-too-distant past, this sort of setback would plunge me into depression, fueled by thoughts like, "If I were good enough, this wouldn't have happened." and other forays into the road of misery and self-deprecation. To my credit, I never once had that thought and Id id get out of the bog of loss and mourning in about 2 hours or so, which may be a world record for me. And, in the future, when I have my next professional disapointment, I'm gong to be over it and have it processed in no more than one hour. I'm aiming for 30 seconds of procesing or even the Zen Buddhist record: one nano second, and it's over and done with. Hey, you gotta have goals.
As a moral to the story, the next day, a nice job came in. This one not only will pay better on the hourly rate, but has much more potential for the long run. So, we'll see if I'm able to parlay it into something better.
I'm still hard at work on the Telluride Blues poster, which is coming out well, and there are a few other good things in the offing. I'm doing too well to let one little disapointment ruin my day, or my life, whichever comes first.
posted by Rich Sigberman at
3:11 PM
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